'How Can I be Too High in Rank to Dine with the Servants, but Too Low to Dine with My Family?': Intersectionality and Postfeminism in Amma Asante's Belle

Jessica Taylor

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Historical films featuring female protagonists can offer a radical point of departure from the individualising discourses that buttress contemporary enactments of neoliberalism, such as postfeminist and postracial logics. This article analyses Amma Asante's 2013 film Belle through an intersectional framework, highlighting the film's Black feminist sensibility. Produced in a postfeminist context and located within the postfeminist historical women's film subgenre, however, Belle's radicality is simultaneously contained by the postfeminist and postracial logics that silence race and gender differences as significant spaces of marginalisation. This article, through examining protagonist Dido's relationships, thus considers how intersectionality, postfeminism and the postracial interact within the film to both produce and undermine a Black feminist approach to history.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)769-785
Number of pages17
JournalGender and History
Volume30
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2018

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